More than 4,000 mentally ill inmates held in solitary in US - report

More than 4,000 prisoners with serious mental illness are being held in solitary confinement in US prisons ... despite the knowledge that holding people in isolation exacerbates mental problems and can even trigger them.

A survey by Yale law researchers together with the Association of State Correctional Administrators (ASCA) has revealed the shocking prevalence of solitary confinement among prisoners struggling with profound mental health issues. They are kept in total isolation for at least 22 hours a day for 15 continuous days or more.

Missouri had the highest number – 703 inmates – while New Mexico had the highest proportion, with some 64% of its mentally ill prisoners being kept in solitary.

On Tuesday the US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an opinion in a case which the court declined to hear in which she said she was “deeply troubled” by the on-going practice. She wrote that “solitary confinement imprints on those that it clutches a wide range of psychological scars”.

Referencing Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Sotomayor lamented that prisoners were being held in conditions of “near-total isolation from the living world”, in what she said “comes perilously close to a penal tomb”.